Science of Discworld III

cultures via their Make-a-Christian or Make-a-Maya kit, put different-strength labels on, for example, human sacrifice, so that it has a whole host of associations in adult life. Our adult prejudices, and our scientific theories, go in on top of this crazy mishmash of historical errors, badly understood schooling, mathematics and statistics that barely make sense to us, God-stories of causality and ethics, and educational lies-to-children that permit the teacher to disengage his brain in response to children’s questions.
    This mental mishmash is well illustrated by our changing attitudes to Mars. Mars was known to the ancients as a ‘wandering star’, a planet; its reddish colour had bloody associations, so the Romans associated it with their god of war. It also acquired a connection with war in astrology, where the visible stars and planets all had to mean something. We’re going to look at a lot of different associations with Mars, 3 as myth and rationality engaged with the red planet, as stories by the hundred employed Mars and Martians, and as the scientific picture of Mars changed over the centuries.
    We shouldn’t ask ‘which is the true Mars?’ We become larger humans by considering all of these aspects; from that stance there really isn’t a true, real, objective planet for our minds to engage with usefully. Our simple, thin causal lines can’t comprehend a real astronomical object, even a world which is actually out there so that we can see it. The ‘it’ we see can be the disc whose apparent lines Giovanni Schiaparelli called ‘canali’, which excited Percival Lowell (whose grasp of Italian seems to have been slight, since the word means ‘channels’) to see them as engineered canals. He wrote Mars as the Abode of Life , and this laid the foundation for the folk Mars of the twentieth century.
    Between the World Wars, everybody in the West, and many in the East, looked into the night sky and saw inimical Martians, a mental residue of that 1920s picture of a drying, dying Mars. The image was overlaid by the War of the Worlds picture of envious, grim, disgusting tripod Martians invading Earth (or at least England). There was a more romantic overlay for many of those out camping, or sleeping out under the stars: Barsoom . Edgar Rice Burroughs, familiar because of his Tarzan stories, invented a Mars whose dried-out seabeds were home to green Martian warrior hordes, six-legged centaur-like creatures whose egg-incubators were visited regularly. John Carter, an American ex-confederate army officer, had wished himself on to Mars, been captured by the green warriors but soon found himself married to a red Martian princess. 4 Stanley Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey added more dimensions: the Martian called Tweel,who made long hops and landed on his nose, the hypnotic predator that showed you your most desirable images, and attempts at a gosh-wow desert ecology. Then there were stories of Martians coming to Earth, pretending to be human … and humans attempting to interact with a more or less mystical ancient Martian civilisation.
    The best known, perhaps the best crafted of these romantic-mystical portrayals of crude, lumbering Earthmen, insensitive to the ethereal beauties of the Martian crystal cities, were Ray Bradbury’s. In the 1950s and 1960s his tales were read by many outside the fantasy/SF world, and they appeared in widely read magazines like Argosy as well as in SF pulps in railway station bookstores. They laid the mystical ancient Martian foundation for Robert Heinlein to build the most potent of all these Martian tales, Stranger in a Strange Land . Michael Valentine Smith had been a foundling on Mars, brought up and trained in their culture by the ancient Martians. He came to Earth, founded a commune of friends – ‘Water Brothers’ – and started a religion whose ‘grokking the fullness’ of everyday events, from sex to science to swimming, spread to communities of readers. There was a tragic, well-publicised association with the murderous Manson killers, who had used this book as their mantra, but this didn’t harm sales, and the ancient mystical Martians became the standard image.
    Then we learned that Mars has no atmosphere to speak of, that it is cold, dry, laden with frozen carbon dioxide, to the extent that the ‘icecaps’ were probably dry ice. Our machines visited Mars, looked for ‘life’, and found strange chemistry because we inevitably asked the wrong questions.